Zcash New Update: New Software of Zcash Sets Stage for Sapling Upgrade

The development team behind Zcash digital currency has developed a new software which contains support components of the planned Sapling upgrade of the network, and it is scheduled to occur later in the year.

Sapling is not the first hard fork for the digital currency on the horizon – that is Overwinter, scheduled for late June this year – but the 1.1.1 update sets the initial rules of consensus in place as it prepares a Sapling-based testnet, according to the notes released on Wednesday this week.

The First Details about Sapling

The Zcash development team first publicized some details about the Sapling back in February 2017, which is focused at increasing the speed of transactions in the network, as reported previously. What is lacking is an activation block height – basically, the next block of transactions at which point the Sapling hard fork takes effect – according to the development team of Zcash, this will also be included in a future update.

Because the activation height of the Sapling isn’t yet specified for the Mainnet, version 1.1.1 will act the same way as other pre-Sapling releases even after a future Sapling activation on the network. Upgrading from version 1.1.1 will be mandatory in order to follow the upgrade of the Sapling network on Mainnet.

Overwinter Upgrade

The Overwinter upgrade scheduled to take place next month is positioned, in part, as a means of setting a stage for future hard forks – a procedure that has encouraged controversy for other protocols of blockchain including Bitcoin – to take place on Zcash. This was previously reported on CoinDesk.

The Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Zerocoin Electronic Coin Company (which develops the network) – Zooko Wilcox, said a couple of months ago that the purpose of doing this is to get practice doing network upgrades and to get used to the entire process.